Beautiful Scotland

Beautiful Scotland is a long-established community environmental improvement campaign which we run in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) under the Britain in Bloom campaign. The programme supports community groups across Scotland as they seek to improve and enhance their local environment. Beautiful Scotland is a competition – based on three pillars – with an extensive set of awards and medals.

Beautiful Scotland provides the Scottish entrants to the UK-wide Britain in Bloom competition, which is run by the Royal Horticultural Society. The competition takes place between the regional and national winners in 18 areas – Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey and 12 English regions. The regional winners from any given year are entered into the UK-wide event for the following year.

Scotland has been extremely successful in Britain in Bloom in recent years, with at least one class winner in every year since 2005. Most impressively, Scottish entrants have won the highest Champion of Champion award three times in the seven years from 2006-2012, with two successes for the large village of Falkland in Fife, and one win for the small town of Alness in the Highlands.

Registration for the 2019 Beautiful Scotland campaign is now open until the end of April - free registration in your first year! (excluding BID and Town Centre/City Centre entries). You can enter here.

In its current and previous incarnations, Beautiful Scotland has been running for over 50 years. At its launch in 1967, ‘In Bloom’ was run by the then Scottish Tourist Board and supported by the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, and provided a platform for beautification of villages, towns and cities. The initial focus of the campaign was on horticulture, and while that remains a key theme there is now also a focus on environmental responsibility and community participation.

Beautiful Scotland has a sister programme – which we also run in conjunction with the RHS – called It’s Your Neighbourhood. This is a non-competitive, community environmental improvement campaign designed to attract volunteer-led community groups who wish to clean and beautify their local neighbourhoods - whether through, for example, community allotments, Friends of Parks groups, after-school clubs, adopting a piece of derelict land. Read more about it here.